The Mysterious Disappearance of Fisheries Observer Keith Davis

A little over a year before Keith Davis disappeared at sea, he sent an ominous email to friends. In it, he linked to a video that shows four men being shot to death while they cling to debris in the ocean. After the gunshots ring out and blood spills into the water, the camera pans to the boat, reportedly a tuna fishing vessel from Taiwan, where men are laughing and posing for photos. The YouTube video describes the victims as Fijian, killed just beyond Fijian waters. Other commenters claim they were Somali pirates whose attempts at hijacking the tuna vessel off the coast of Somalia backfired. “One way or another, the video depicts murder,” wrote Davis. The 40-year-old was a fisheries observer—a member of a little-known profession tasked with traveling aboard the boats used to fish the world’s oceans to monitor and collect data from the catches—and spent much of his time far from shore. The nature of his work made him an outsider among captain and crew: a tiny, isolated speck in a vast ocean. Davis often confided to friends about his increasing unease over the lack of law enforcement at sea and the mounting dangers facing both fishermen and the observers who monitor them. The video is an extreme example of what sometimes goes on in the middle of the ocean, wrote Davis. “But know that there is other awful stuff that happens out there that goes unpublished.” Read the story here 15:04

NILS STOLPE: The New England groundfish debacle (Part IV): Is cutting back harvest really the answer?

While it’s a fact that’s hardly ever acknowledged, the assumption in fisheries management is that if the population of a stock of fish isn’t at some arbitrary level, it’s because of too much fishing. Hence the term “overfished.” Hence the mandated knee jerk reaction of the fisheries managers to not enough fish; cut back on fishing. What of other factors? They don’t count. It’s all about fishing, because fishing is all that the managers can control; it’s their Maslow’s Hammer. When it comes to the oceans it seems as if it’s about all that the industry connected mega-foundations that support the anti-fishing ENGOs with hundreds of millions of dollars a year in “donations” are interested in controlling. Read the article here

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